Misleading Sales Data - Amazon Purchased Product Report

Published on October 24, 2024

About this video

In this episode, we break down the often misleading sales metrics in Amazon's Campaign Manager. If you’ve struggled to understand why your results don’t match the metrics, this video is a must-watch!

*What You’ll Learn* **Why Sales Metrics Can Mislead:** Discover why campaign manager sales metrics don’t always tell the full story and how this can impact your advertising strategy. **How to Fix It:** We’ll guide you through the specific reports and data you should focus on to get a more accurate understanding of your campaign's performance. **Key Reports to Use:** Learn about the essential Amazon reports, including Purchased Product Reports and Search Term Reports, that will provide the insights needed for better decision-making.

🚨 **Why Accurate Metrics Matter:** Using misleading metrics can lead to poor decisions in your Amazon PPC campaigns. We’ll show you how to identify these metrics, dive into hidden reports, and make smarter, data-driven choices that lead to real success.

🔑 **Key Takeaways:** - Not all metrics in Amazon’s campaign manager are reliable. - Digging deeper into specific reports helps reveal accurate performance data. - Avoid relying solely on high-level sales metrics to optimize your ad campaigns.

🛠️ **Tools & Techniques:** We cover the best tools and methods for analyzing your Amazon advertising performance beyond the default metrics.

🎯 **Common Mistakes to Avoid:** - Relying on misleading sales metrics. - Failing to use Amazon’s detailed reports. - Ignoring data that truly matters for decision-making.

👉 **Subscribe to Amazonia PPC** for more expert insights on optimizing your Amazon ads and scaling your business. Have questions? Drop them in the comments!

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Transcript

hi guys and welcome to Amazonia PPC channel in today's episode I'm going to talk about one of the misleading metrics in the campaign manager which is the sales metrics um I'm going to explain why it is completely misleading in most of the cases and how to overcome that so stay tuned the most important thing to note here is that I keep saying that not all of the metrics are true when you take a look at the campaign manager those are the overall metrics that help you understand what happens in your account but to make proper decisions on your advertising you need to dive deep into the uh some of the reports that are behind the scenes uh now the report that we're going to talk about in this video is called sponsor product purchase product report and you can find it when you open up the the report section you will see sponsor products and by default it's going to point to the search term but just select drop- down menu select purchase product the maximum date range available is 60 days so you can choose that one or any any other that you like I like to go with a longest period available sorry so when you run the report you will get an Excel file like this now I had to remove some of the data and hide the columns for for the Privacy sake but the point is that you will have uh a clear column where it says which product is advertise and which product is sold and that's what what what you need to to have uh now to pull the correct data you have to add additional column here it's called I called it same product sales and there's a pretty easy formula to use that let me pull that for you so the the formula is that just it Compares um the purchased product Asin and the advertised as and if they are the same it gives you the result of one and if they are different it gives you zero so it's really simple so just change your columns with those uh that you have in your in your own report that gives you an information uh on how many actually advertised products are being sold then when you do a pivot table you will have the I'm going to show you two two examples let me P this somewhere so I'm going to show you two examples one is called other SQ sales and that's why you need that that column this table is used to show you how many product sales happened that aren't not the the advertised product and it's amazing what you can see here so some of the SE some of the orders that are other skus so take a look at this so the other SKU orders are 74 and the same product sales only two for this as and then for the for the next one 76 and only 12 out of those are the actual product sales so you can also see this by if you calculate the average order value from your campaigns for for example your product is $50 and you see that you had one sale and the sales value in the campaign manager is $12 that's obvious that uh that wasn't the product that's being sold here you can see how I organized this pivot table so just pull the advertised SKU inside uh pull the uh 7-Day order SQ orders and the newly created column same product sales and you will get this information information it really gives you a breakdown of what's actually happening in some of these you can even see that for this one only so so no same product sales at all but nine other ones now it's important to know that for this account there are many size variation of the actual product and that's why you see this High numbers of other product sales but very often these numbers vary from 40 to 50% average on average uh of the other SQ sales now the even better report for me is the the the second one now this involves some of the uh manual approach after summarizing the the pivot table so I'm going to click here so you can see the setup this product uh sorry this report you can pull automatically without adding that additional column additional column is for the other SQ sales pivot table here just pull to the row the advertised SKU the purchase SKU and the 7-Day other SKU orders and you will get this one um here I added these column CND afterwards manually but the point is here you can see the breakdown of all the uh different acents here so on from the one advertised which exact SKU was being sold and and I painted red in these uh where there was a zero or sorry the PT painted red are the actual the same sorry same SK or skq ERS here then what I did is I calc I summarized how many different size variations uh are being sold from the same parent because here in this account products are organized like one parent Asin contains size variations and you can do that for color variations or or any other and I saw that out of 74 orders I saw 66 same parent sales which means that people are clicking on the advertised product but then they decide to actually buy the different size which is normal um and then I uh use the formula to have a percentage of the same parent sales so 89% of the sales came actually from the same parent as which gives us an information that uh we need to look at the broader image of what's happening in the advertise account so it's not only that if you here if you focus only on acost that that's going to be completely misleading uh because you will see here the example you will see I hope it's visible yeah um this these are the different VAR size variations and you can see the a cost for example for this one a cost is 25% 38 not not that high so you would say like 30% is pretty good but here's the the actual uh breakdown of how how my brain works regarding this topic so uh here you can see let's start with this one so we're spending ,000 on ads we're having a decent AC cost for this one there are no organic units they're only PPC orders by the way this screenshot is from scale insides but you can pull this from seller board or any other uh software that uh that you use or if you don't use any software software then you probably have some kind of um system to see profits not only the acost but profits if you don't then and please do so use solar board it's really affordable and it provides an amazing amount of data uh plus we have um I'm going to add a link in description where you can have a mon two with the free trial so use it wisely anyway back to the point a cost of 30% so one would actually really easily think like I'm doing great with a a cost of 30% but what's happen is that those um that kind of money that we invested in promoting this product are actually not influencing organic sales at all but for the other one this one is our hero product we're investing uh 2,300 in promoting this product Yos is a bit higher but we have a good organic ranks for this one so you can see that there's 46 organic iic unit sold and 143 uh advertise unit sold so we would have much more success if we take this additional ,000 and put it to the hero product okay this one will going to have even more negative profit on the child acing level but that's not a point because we're going to use this one which has the best click through rate best conver verion rate as a driver for all the other sales and by having most of the budget on this one we at the same time we're going to drive organic ranks even more and more and more which will lead to more organic sales not only the paid ones and all the others all the other variations are going to benefit from it for example this one you can see that we're spending only €1 on this one and having 52 organic order so that's really what we need to uh take into the account so it's not only uh several takeaways it's not only the aost it's the profit it's similar to what's what's happening on every Prime day so people are bragging about their revenue go Revenue numbers like I hit 8 million 9 million 20 million but the actual profit margin for in uh Prime day was like I don't know 1% 2% 3% really really low most of the time so it's good for ego I Know It Feels Right feels good but at the end of the day we're not leaving off of the ego but uh out of the money that we earned so pay attention on your profit margins at the parent level if that's um something that can be used in your account but take a look at the definitely take a look at what is happening on a child level but use your best and hero product hero variation to drive that meaningful traffic because that one is going to have the best click through rate best conversion rate but don't focus on that single child Ace in AC cost because it can have high acost but that investment in at is going to benefit you with the sales of the other products and also uh check to see if that hero product is having if that one is the candidate for the organic ranking because I know that for for example for this one we literally don't have any organic ranks at all but for this one we're pretty good so we're going to uh we already shifted uh spend from this one to Hero product yeah so pretty misleading data if you only take a look at the campaign level campaign manager and take a look at the sales data you can assume that you're doing great for a product but actually you're selling uh many other products uh additional good thing about the uh report is that you can have some additional insights on maybe to promote another one maybe this is not a hero product at all maybe you should focus on promoting some of the other ones it's all about testing so yeah let me know what you think and stay tuned more videos are coming up bye-bye

Frequently asked questions

Why are the sales figures shown in Amazon Campaign Manager often misleading?

Campaign Manager attributes a sale to a campaign whenever a shopper clicks an ad and then purchases any product from your catalog within the attribution window, not only the product that was advertised. If a shopper clicks an ad for a small size variation and then buys a large size, the sale is credited to the campaign that ran the small size ad. This means your ACoS and sales figures at the campaign or ad level can look very different from what is actually happening at the product level. Relying on Campaign Manager sales numbers alone to evaluate performance can lead you to over-invest in campaigns that are generating sales of other products rather than the one being advertised.

What is the Purchased Product Report and where do you find it?

The Sponsored Products Purchased Product Report shows you, for each advertised ASIN, exactly which product was actually bought after a shopper clicked your ad. To access it, go to the reporting section in Campaign Manager, select Sponsored Products, and change the report type dropdown from the default Search Term to Purchased Product. The report covers up to 60 days of data. The output is an Excel file with columns showing the advertised ASIN and the purchased ASIN side by side, which makes it possible to identify how often the product that generated the click is actually the product that gets sold.

How do you analyze the Purchased Product Report to see how many sales were actually for the advertised product versus something else?

After downloading the report, add a helper column that compares the advertised ASIN and the purchased ASIN. If they match, assign the value 1; if they differ, assign 0. Then build a pivot table using the advertised ASIN as the row, and include total orders alongside the new same-product column. This immediately shows you, for each advertised product, how many of the attributed sales were actually for that product and how many were for something else in your catalog. In the example from the video, one variation had 76 attributed orders but only 12 of those were for the advertised product, meaning 64 sales went to other sizes or products in the same parent.

What does it mean when a large portion of sales from an advertised variation go to other size variations in the same parent ASIN?

It tells you that the advertised variation is functioning as a traffic driver for the broader product family rather than converting primarily on its own. Shoppers click the ad and are genuinely interested in the product, but they choose a different size when they reach the listing. This is normal buyer behavior when a product has multiple size variations. The implication for ad strategy is that the ACoS of that specific advertised variation looks artificially high because much of the revenue it generates appears under different child ASINs. Evaluating performance at the parent ASIN level, rather than the individual child level, gives a more accurate picture of whether the advertising investment is profitable overall.

Which product should receive the most advertising budget in a catalog with multiple variations, and why?

The variation with the best click-through rate and conversion rate should absorb the majority of the ad budget, because it is the most efficient driver of both paid and organic sales for the entire parent ASIN. Even if that variation shows a higher ACoS on its own, the organic ranking it builds benefits all other variations in the family, and you will often find that other variations generate organic orders without any direct ad spend once the hero product establishes a strong ranking. Splitting budget evenly across all variations or concentrating spend on a variation with a lower ACoS but weaker conversion rate misallocates resources. The video illustrates this with a product spending very little on a high-ACoS hero variation that was generating 143 paid and 46 organic orders, while a separate variation consumed a thousand euros in ad spend with zero organic orders, making the former clearly the better investment.